Friday, April 29, 2016

Gasp:
We knew that the CO2 being taken up by the oceans was driving up the
acidity to the point – currently 30% more acidic than before we
started killing ourselves with progress - that crustaceans such were
having trouble making shells and corals were bleaching. Now we find
that the oxygen levels in the seas are falling; warming oceans absorb
less oxygen and turn over more slowly, leading to depletion at
depths. This deoxygenation poses a major threat to marine life and
is one of the most deadly side-effects from a global warming. No
oxygen in the water, no life in the seas. No life in the seas,
little elsewhere.

Wish
Them Luck: Iran
is calling for the global destruction of weapons of mass destruction.
If they will include religion under that rubric, I'm for it.

Mirrors: The US foreign
policy establishment, in and out of government, Republican, Democrat
and academic is having kittens over Trump's foreign policy speech.
Based on the last thirty years of misadventures and international
disasters, quite where the establishment gets a pulpit to preach from
is a mystery. Name something they've gotten right. Anything? We'd be
a lot better off without their expertise and so would hundreds of
thousand dead civilians.

Boom:
In March the median
annual household income in the
US reached $57,263,
close to the real level of that existed in January 2000. Yeah,
recovery!

Capitalism
Clarified: The
Taiwanese conglomerate building a state-of-the-art steel mill on the
Vietnamese coast explains that the choice is “whether
to catch fish and shrimp” or to build the
mill. Let them eat ball bearings.

Like
A Virgin: Ted
Cruz's Super PAC either transferred or donated (there seem to be
legal differences) but at any rate gave Carly Fiorina's Super PAC
half a million dollars. No, not to get her to
help him lose, but back when Trump was accusing Cruz of having
extra-marital affairs and one of Carly's campaign workers was rumored
to be involved. This is the only known
instance of a candidate
giving
an opponent half a million bucks.

Hide
In Plain Sight:
The National Security Agency is so busy scooping up every tweet,
text, email and phone conversation that is overwhelmed and cannot
separate the wheat from the chaff. If there is any wheat, that is.

Job
Well Done:
Volkswagen's departing CEO will get a $8.2 million goodbye gift in
honor of his
years and years of deceitful marketing. Cheap compared to the
estimated $18 billion the deliberate fraud will end up costing the
stockholders.

Quoted:“Many
Americans have almost no savings, so they have barely any wealth.
Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck.”

Right
Hand Washes Left:
Germany is going to underwrite the sales of new electric cars to the
tune of €1bn. Maybe they could take the money from the profits
that VW, Audi and others have made cheating on diesel emissions.

Making
Haste Slowly:
The Fed now sees real GDP growth in 1Q2016 as 0.6%, maybe
even 0.5%, not the puny 0.4% previously reported. Too bad it
seems based on Consumer
spending, largely on services,

Succinctly:“I have never worked
with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” John
Boehner describing Ted Cruz.

3 comments:

51st floor isn't half-way up the Empire State BuildingUse of a median is a favorite tool from How To Lie With Statistics, it is can be used to either expose or to perpetrate a deception. A median is

...a number separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 3, 5, 9, 11} is 5). ..... median can be used as a measure of location when a distribution is skewed, when end-values are not known, or when one requires reduced importance to be attached to outliers,**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median

** ie: don't look at those rich bastards just raking it in.

The reported number can't be the real median, therefore it must be drawn from a manufactured distribution, known as a trimmed range. Who trimmed the range has the same import as follow the money.

Bratwurst gives me gas: Germany's carbon emissions have gone up along with it's solar and wind power production, so those cars will still create large amounts of C02, particularly in their production. Seems moving to high density and mass transit doesn't offer the same opportunities for corruption, as San Francisco proves.http://archpaper.com/2016/04/san-francisco-solar-panels-density/Apparently Germany is not planning on settling/integrating any of those refuges after all.

the previous poster seems to be expressing distrust of the median - in my view, it's a very useful statistic, especially to describe income distribution - it specifically refers to the "person in the middle"

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.